Before I found that there was a lot more money and a lost less hours and stress doing consulting than being a cubicle drone, I worked for a large hosting company.
Handling a DDOS attack is a piece of cake. We handled a few a week and this was in the early 2000s. We would watch the router traffic graphs and see a spike that might be eating 5% or 10% of our capacity and just grin. All you need is money. Your ISP needs giant pipes, spare server capacity distributed around the world and sharp network guys, and for the right price, they'll simply make the problem go away for you.
However the cost of doing this means that if $1500 to Rackspace sounds like a lot of money, you're not in this league.
If you're at the "less than $200/month" level for hosting, your best course of action is to not piss people off, and if you're attacked just hope you can wait it out.
The "up side" of having a small site with cheap hosting is that it probably won't actually do much damage to your business if it's down for a few days.
> I'm 43 and I work in the way he describes. I've never had more freedom, more time, or more money.
Absolutely! Start your own business and whore yourself out to the companies that were dumb enough to fire all their really talented guys.
I've never been happier. I wake up every morning at the crack of "whenever the hell I feel like it", make breakfast, take the dog out for a walk, then drop in on some clients.
While the money has never been better, the freedom and peace of mind is infinitely more valuable.
My bet here is that some Slashdot posters are going to enter this conversation and tell you that you don't need a CS degree to be successful. That you might even be able to get away with taking a few formal classes, working on some more open source projects, and to keep trying.
I have no CS degree. I have no degree of any kind and have been working in IT for 25+ years. I was snatched out of college before I had the chance to finish my P/E requirement. Apparently knowing how to run around a track or dribble a basketball was important somehow. In any case, I never went back and never finished.
In any case, once you have some successes under your belt, nobody gives a crap where (or if) you graduated.
While there's nothing wrong with a degree, it really doesn't certify that you have any special knowledge or level of expertise, it certifies that you're a good drone and can put up with huge quantities of pointless tasks and bullshit assignments, which makes you perfect for the corporate workforce or government.
* Ahem * As a degree holder in Political Science with a minor in International Relations,,i>kaff-kaff,/i>, I may be able to contribute here. The suspicions above are not without foundation. However, historically whenever a totalitarian regime has tried to espouse free and independent thought in a "contained" place, they often wind up growing free thinkers that they cannot later control. Hitler tried coddling his engineers, but they wound up sending secrets to the English and Americans. Stalin tried pampering Sakarov. So while I wouldn't drop my drawers in Chongqing's proposed Cloud Computing Special Zone, but I would applaud and encourage it. It could become an incubator for a representative there who actually believes what he's promising and would be frustrated to learn he's a front... a breeding ground for future Nobel Peace Prize nominees. So polite hurrahs are warranted.
Oddly enough, the Chinese government isn't stupid and takes a very long-term view of things.
This could be exactly what they're planning and want this to happen so they can have the benefits and freedom due to the "changing times" without having to embarrass themselves by back-peddling with their current policy. It also lets them selectively enforce "who has freedom" by allowing the access policy to the area be "leaky".
If you don't control everything on the box, you can't ensure security.
Regardless of what they claim or what they do, you're essentially sharing the box with hundreds or thousands of other users who potentially have access to run whatever they feel like.
I would suggest a Virtual Private Server on Linode. Your server is yours and security will live or die by how you configure it.
When most of the long haul and medium haul fiber was laid, they didn't just bury what they needed, they buried a bunch of it. However most was never connected to equipment (lit up).
This dark fiber is still sitting in trenches and conduits (many were taxpayer funded) running along a huge number of US superhighways, and has not seen a single byte of data.
This is mostly because having additional capacity would remove the artifical limits, increase the supply and cause prices for internet access to drop.
While some companies have problems with "the last mile" (to the home), companies that ran fiber to the home like Verizon, are still attempting to limit bandwidth and create artifical shortages.
In fact, I went on to say "If you really need 24x7x365 support, you need three shifts of employees, not one poor bastard that you think you can call at 3am because something is unhappy"
It worked just fine and I never got a call. when I went home at night, I was gone. When I came back in the morning, I was there.
Setting limits with employers will do wonders for reducing stress and workload. They probably won't fire you unless they're complete dickheads, in which case a better job awaits somewhere else.
People in userland need data from the SCADA network to keep the business running. They absolutely must have a way to get it. Saying "no" isn't an option.
Sure it is.
Watch this: "You're being paid to do a job. Being inconvient helps to safeguard the public utilities and prevents tampering from remote locations. If I find any systems that are connected to the public internet in any manner no matter how convoluted, I will fire the responsible individual(s) and their manager(s) on the spot."
See how easy that is?
Need data? Write it to a DVD and sneakernet it to whoever/whatever needs it.
Good advice. Try it with 30 plants covering a 1500sq mile area. While you were out all day updating your servers, an instrument tech forgot to clean his thumbdrive before plugging it in to an IEM to update the firmware. Since you didn't have regularly updating anti-virus, your whole network is now down and the company is losing millions of dollars an hour in lost production while you try to clean the 60 servers and 400 consoles on your SCADA network.
That's even more of a reason to not be connected to the net. The damage would be limited to the area one man could travel in a day, instead of everything, everywhere.
And you know what? I don't care if it's practical. Not all jobs get to be "convienient".
Good safe practice for separating a process control network from the internet is something like: internet > corporate network > buffer network > process network. Completely separating it is not advisable, because it can actually make it harder to administer and protect (updates, antivirus, etc). It's an option though if you are diligent with sneakernet updates and whatnot.
That's absolutely a recipe for disaster.
Nothing on the SCADA system should connect to anything, on any other network, using any method. No VPN, VLAN, Dameware, Citrix, or anything else you can come up with. Nada. Zip.
If this makes updates harder, that's awesome. It's supposed to. Someone is getting paid to do maintenance. It's their job. If by chance, you wish to do an update at some point, download the update, verify all the signatures with the vendor, burn it to a DVD and walk it over and install it. Then put the DVD somewhere safe, so when your system goes down you can find out what did it.
Advertising exists in order to create a demand for stuff people don't need.
People already know they need food, water and shelter. Nobody needs a steak from Outback or a new Disney toy.
They can't "force" anybody to do anything and if viewing specific content requires watching an ad, then I guess they'll have to get along without my business.
Will be very happy when the market tightens up again (which unfortunately means ageism since the boomers ahead of me have to frikkin retire). And I sympathize with the poor graduating 20 year olds- they are screwed. No jobs so no experience and a $40k college bill.
Sorry to be a downer, but I'm at the tail end of the boom, but really like consulting, and won't be retiring until they drop me into a nice plot near a shade tree and a headstone. 8-)
Happily, if you're good, you can do the same thing. The amount of great work available for competent consultants is nearly infinite. Most of it involves fixing and taking care of stuff some twenty-somethings wrote at 3am after two years of 80 hour weeks, but I don't care since it pays well enough that 20 hours now pays more than 80 hours a couple of decades ago.
because 20-something morons who have never seen a project managed competently think it's supposed to be that way."
I would venture to guess...there are PLENTY of 40-50yr olds that have yet to see a project managed competently...
Most projects are doomed before they start, when the budget, timeline and requirements silently collide in huge explosion that nobody acknowledges seeing or hearing.
I remember back in the dark ages (early 90's) I sat through a meeting describing software that had an only slightly smaller scope than the creation of the universe. After the meeting, I told the project manager that the only way to be on-time, within budget and meet specs would be if he had a magic wand and a time machine.
For some reason that wasn't a popular opinion and I wasn't invited to any more meetings.
OTOH, the project was a massive money sucking hole, and when it was months overdue and way over budget, the company killed it and was sued for breach of contract. Then went bankrupt.
Successful project management starts with realistic expectations, budget and time-line, which due to market-pressures is usually absent.
Dude, I'm 33 years old. I'm married and I've got two kids. It has been years since anyone has been interested in my genitals, and I kind of miss the attention.
I think there are a lot of people with delusions of being supermodels.
Most of the people I see on planes are ugly as hell and getting me to stare at them naked all day on a scanner would require some serious compensation.
Maybe I'm just too old and grumpy, but I've been on the internet since the days when the most useful protocol was telnet, and I thought the same thing as you did when I saw wave. In fact, I tried asking a bunch of much younger people about it, and the best answer I got was that "it allows you to collaborate".
Q: "better than a shared whiteboard and phone call?" A: "well, no . .."
Q: "How do you keep everybody from trashing the design with their own agendas?" A: "You can roll back"
That's the solution? To restore from a backup and waste everybody's time?
While Wave was definitely cool, and I don't fault Google for releasing it (I love playing with new stuff), it bugs the crap out of me that Every New Thing gets a fresh round of "buzz" and internet cheer-leading whether or not it's better than or even as good as what we already have.
There are plenty of pages where the site just will not load unless you give permission to run layers and layers of 3rd,4th,5th party scripts. What can we do as consumers or developers to prevent such behavior on the part of websites?
There's a ton of money to be made in legacy maintenance. And there's a ton of available work for companies that actually have money. Chances are that anybody who still has legacy COBOL apps from the 70's will be here long after you're retired. I know this because maintenance is about 80% of what I do.
Sure, COBOL, SQL and batch jobs aren't glamorous or exciting, but I don't care because I stop by the client location around 10am and leave by 2pm, and make more money than when I was working 12 hours a day. When I want excitement, I go SCUBA diving and when I want to relax, I take a vacation. I took about 6 weeks of vacation last year
Don't try to compete with recent grads by learning The New Hot Language. It's irrelevant and you'll never be able to stand out. Do all the old stuff you already know (COBOL, etc.). Few people learn it in school and fewer want to do it. This means you can select only the jobs that pay well and make you happy, set your own hours and actually have a life.
Slashdot Mirror
Nobody has a clue anymore whether they're building on a poured concrete foundation or a bag of cats.
I have a TV antenna.
Just for grins I switched to broadcast TV a few weeks ago. For about 30 seconds.
Someone should put them out of my misery.
Before I found that there was a lot more money and a lost less hours and stress doing consulting than being a cubicle drone, I worked for a large hosting company.
Handling a DDOS attack is a piece of cake. We handled a few a week and this was in the early 2000s. We would watch the router traffic graphs and see a spike that might be eating 5% or 10% of our capacity and just grin. All you need is money. Your ISP needs giant pipes, spare server capacity distributed around the world and sharp network guys, and for the right price, they'll simply make the problem go away for you.
However the cost of doing this means that if $1500 to Rackspace sounds like a lot of money, you're not in this league.
If you're at the "less than $200/month" level for hosting, your best course of action is to not piss people off, and if you're attacked just hope you can wait it out.
The "up side" of having a small site with cheap hosting is that it probably won't actually do much damage to your business if it's down for a few days.
> I'm 43 and I work in the way he describes. I've never had more freedom, more time, or more money.
Absolutely! Start your own business and whore yourself out to the companies that were dumb enough to fire all their really talented guys.
I've never been happier. I wake up every morning at the crack of "whenever the hell I feel like it", make breakfast, take the dog out for a walk, then drop in on some clients.
While the money has never been better, the freedom and peace of mind is infinitely more valuable.
My bet here is that some Slashdot posters are going to enter this conversation and tell you that you don't need a CS degree to be successful. That you might even be able to get away with taking a few formal classes, working on some more open source projects, and to keep trying.
I have no CS degree. I have no degree of any kind and have been working in IT for 25+ years. I was snatched out of college before I had the chance to finish my P/E requirement. Apparently knowing how to run around a track or dribble a basketball was important somehow. In any case, I never went back and never finished.
In any case, once you have some successes under your belt, nobody gives a crap where (or if) you graduated.
While there's nothing wrong with a degree, it really doesn't certify that you have any special knowledge or level of expertise, it certifies that you're a good drone and can put up with huge quantities of pointless tasks and bullshit assignments, which makes you perfect for the corporate workforce or government.
I'm sure any number of military and intelligence agencies would be thrilled to give them a pile of money and all the cool toys they could handle.
* Ahem * As a degree holder in Political Science with a minor in International Relations, ,i>kaff-kaff,/i>, I may be able to contribute here. The suspicions above are not without foundation. However, historically whenever a totalitarian regime has tried to espouse free and independent thought in a "contained" place, they often wind up growing free thinkers that they cannot later control. Hitler tried coddling his engineers, but they wound up sending secrets to the English and Americans. Stalin tried pampering Sakarov. So while I wouldn't drop my drawers in Chongqing's proposed Cloud Computing Special Zone, but I would applaud and encourage it. It could become an incubator for a representative there who actually believes what he's promising and would be frustrated to learn he's a front... a breeding ground for future Nobel Peace Prize nominees. So polite hurrahs are warranted.
Oddly enough, the Chinese government isn't stupid and takes a very long-term view of things.
This could be exactly what they're planning and want this to happen so they can have the benefits and freedom due to the "changing times" without having to embarrass themselves by back-peddling with their current policy. It also lets them selectively enforce "who has freedom" by allowing the access policy to the area be "leaky".
If you don't control everything on the box, you can't ensure security.
Regardless of what they claim or what they do, you're essentially sharing the box with hundreds or thousands of other users who potentially have access to run whatever they feel like.
I would suggest a Virtual Private Server on Linode. Your server is yours and security will live or die by how you configure it.
When most of the long haul and medium haul fiber was laid, they didn't just bury what they needed, they buried a bunch of it. However most was never connected to equipment (lit up).
This dark fiber is still sitting in trenches and conduits (many were taxpayer funded) running along a huge number of US superhighways, and has not seen a single byte of data.
This is mostly because having additional capacity would remove the artifical limits, increase the supply and cause prices for internet access to drop.
While some companies have problems with "the last mile" (to the home), companies that ran fiber to the home like Verizon, are still attempting to limit bandwidth and create artifical shortages.
My answer was to "say no"
In fact, I went on to say "If you really need 24x7x365 support, you need three shifts of employees, not one poor bastard that you think you can call at 3am because something is unhappy"
It worked just fine and I never got a call. when I went home at night, I was gone. When I came back in the morning, I was there.
Setting limits with employers will do wonders for reducing stress and workload. They probably won't fire you unless they're complete dickheads, in which case a better job awaits somewhere else.
If I get a text about a giant tornado headed my way, do you honestly think I care if they charge me 20 cents for the "head's up"?
That is completely impractical.
People in userland need data from the SCADA network to keep the business running. They absolutely must have a way to get it. Saying "no" isn't an option.
Sure it is.
Watch this: "You're being paid to do a job. Being inconvient helps to safeguard the public utilities and prevents tampering from remote locations. If I find any systems that are connected to the public internet in any manner no matter how convoluted, I will fire the responsible individual(s) and their manager(s) on the spot."
See how easy that is?
Need data? Write it to a DVD and sneakernet it to whoever/whatever needs it.
Good advice. Try it with 30 plants covering a 1500sq mile area. While you were out all day updating your servers, an instrument tech forgot to clean his thumbdrive before plugging it in to an IEM to update the firmware. Since you didn't have regularly updating anti-virus, your whole network is now down and the company is losing millions of dollars an hour in lost production while you try to clean the 60 servers and 400 consoles on your SCADA network.
That's even more of a reason to not be connected to the net. The damage would be limited to the area one man could travel in a day, instead of everything, everywhere.
And you know what? I don't care if it's practical. Not all jobs get to be "convienient".
That's absolutely a recipe for disaster.
Nothing on the SCADA system should connect to anything, on any other network, using any method. No VPN, VLAN, Dameware, Citrix, or anything else you can come up with. Nada. Zip.
If this makes updates harder, that's awesome. It's supposed to. Someone is getting paid to do maintenance. It's their job. If by chance, you wish to do an update at some point, download the update, verify all the signatures with the vendor, burn it to a DVD and walk it over and install it. Then put the DVD somewhere safe, so when your system goes down you can find out what did it.
Advertising exists in order to create a demand for stuff people don't need.
People already know they need food, water and shelter. Nobody needs a steak from Outback or a new Disney toy.
They can't "force" anybody to do anything and if viewing specific content requires watching an ad, then I guess they'll have to get along without my business.
Will be very happy when the market tightens up again (which unfortunately means ageism since the boomers ahead of me have to frikkin retire). And I sympathize with the poor graduating 20 year olds- they are screwed. No jobs so no experience and a $40k college bill.
Sorry to be a downer, but I'm at the tail end of the boom, but really like consulting, and won't be retiring until they drop me into a nice plot near a shade tree and a headstone. 8-)
Happily, if you're good, you can do the same thing. The amount of great work available for competent consultants is nearly infinite. Most of it involves fixing and taking care of stuff some twenty-somethings wrote at 3am after two years of 80 hour weeks, but I don't care since it pays well enough that 20 hours now pays more than 80 hours a couple of decades ago.
because 20-something morons who have never seen a project managed competently think it's supposed to be that way." I would venture to guess...there are PLENTY of 40-50yr olds that have yet to see a project managed competently...
Most projects are doomed before they start, when the budget, timeline and requirements silently collide in huge explosion that nobody acknowledges seeing or hearing.
I remember back in the dark ages (early 90's) I sat through a meeting describing software that had an only slightly smaller scope than the creation of the universe. After the meeting, I told the project manager that the only way to be on-time, within budget and meet specs would be if he had a magic wand and a time machine.
For some reason that wasn't a popular opinion and I wasn't invited to any more meetings.
OTOH, the project was a massive money sucking hole, and when it was months overdue and way over budget, the company killed it and was sued for breach of contract. Then went bankrupt.
Successful project management starts with realistic expectations, budget and time-line, which due to market-pressures is usually absent.
What makes you think they'll write the right code? That's what experience buys.
They probably won't, but it's easy enough to say "No that's not right, fix it."
Why on earth should I work insane hours to write code that younger people can write faster and cheaper (and honestly probably better)?
Start your own business and hire the "young guns" instead of complaining about them.
If I need a bunch of code written, I'll hire 20-somethings to write it while I go SCUBA Diving in the Caribbean.
Life is short, you might as well enjoy it because, well, because . . . "fun is better than anxiety"
In SCUBA diving, it's simply not possible to connect the wrong hose to the wrong thing.
Low pressure hoses (140PSI) simply do not fit in (3000PSI) ports. 200Bar regulators do not fit on 300 bar valves.
In fact, this is exactly the reason that household natural gas flexible connector fittings are no longer compatible with plumbing fittings.
There's absolutely no excuse for anything that connects to a human to have the possibility of a fatal mistake.
Dude, I'm 33 years old. I'm married and I've got two kids. It has been years since anyone has been interested in my genitals, and I kind of miss the attention.
I think there are a lot of people with delusions of being supermodels.
Most of the people I see on planes are ugly as hell and getting me to stare at them naked all day on a scanner would require some serious compensation.
You could take notes of the important parts and screen shots or video of the shared whiteboard.
France is the only country on the planet that has actual SCUBA Police to wander around underwater and make sure you have your "Diving License".
http://www.scubaboard.com/forums/basic-scuba-discussions/300289-scuba-police.html
Maybe I'm just too old and grumpy, but I've been on the internet since the days when the most useful protocol was telnet, and I thought the same thing as you did when I saw wave. In fact, I tried asking a bunch of much younger people about it, and the best answer I got was that "it allows you to collaborate".
Q: "better than a shared whiteboard and phone call?" ."
A: "well, no . .
Q: "How do you keep everybody from trashing the design with their own agendas?"
A: "You can roll back"
That's the solution? To restore from a backup and waste everybody's time?
While Wave was definitely cool, and I don't fault Google for releasing it (I love playing with new stuff), it bugs the crap out of me that Every New Thing gets a fresh round of "buzz" and internet cheer-leading whether or not it's better than or even as good as what we already have.
There are plenty of pages where the site just will not load unless you give permission to run layers and layers of 3rd,4th,5th party scripts. What can we do as consumers or developers to prevent such behavior on the part of websites?
Install User Agent Switcher and browse as Google.
nobody blows off Google.
There's a ton of money to be made in legacy maintenance. And there's a ton of available work for companies that actually have money. Chances are that anybody who still has legacy COBOL apps from the 70's will be here long after you're retired. I know this because maintenance is about 80% of what I do.
Sure, COBOL, SQL and batch jobs aren't glamorous or exciting, but I don't care because I stop by the client location around 10am and leave by 2pm, and make more money than when I was working 12 hours a day. When I want excitement, I go SCUBA diving and when I want to relax, I take a vacation. I took about 6 weeks of vacation last year
Don't try to compete with recent grads by learning The New Hot Language. It's irrelevant and you'll never be able to stand out. Do all the old stuff you already know (COBOL, etc.). Few people learn it in school and fewer want to do it. This means you can select only the jobs that pay well and make you happy, set your own hours and actually have a life.